While waiting in line to get into the rally,eight year-old Grace Cunniff carries a poster in support of John McCain's pick for vice-presidential running mate. 9/6/08 THE DENVER POST/Chuck Bigger

Gov. Sarah Palin and Cindy McCain laugh as Sen. John McCain points to a shirt worn by a crowd member Saturday in Colorado Springs. It depicted a pit bull wearing lipstick, a joke Palin made in her Republican convention speech last week.

Members of the crowd reach out Saturday to shake hands with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Republican nominee for vice president, and U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the party's pick to succeed President Bush.

Thousands turned out Saturday to greet the Republican Party's nominees for president and vice president on their stop in Colorado Springs. Presidential candidate John McCain told the military-town crowd that the U.S. is winning the Iraq war.

COLORADO SPRINGS — In just their second day of campaigning together as official nominees, Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, gave encore performances of their convention-week speeches to an audience of more than 13,000 jubilant supporters here Saturday.

McCain and Palin — standing before a crowd that packed shoulder-to-shoulder into an airplane hangar at the Colorado Springs airport and spilled onto the tarmac outside — hit popular notes from their big-stage speeches by promising to rein in government spending, lead America to energy independence and win the war in Iraq.

“There’s no place more appropriate than here in Colorado Springs, with all the great service of people from here, to tell you this: We are winning in Iraq,” McCain said, drawing some of the biggest cheers of his 15-minute speech.

“We’ll bring our men and women home in honor and in victory and not in defeat,” he said later.

Palin, whose applause perhaps even eclipsed that of McCain’s, attacked Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama for what she said was a lack of accomplishment. She said she and McCain are a “team of mavericks” who could change politics in Washington.

“There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you, and that man is John McCain,” she said to roars from the crowd.

That the pair spent their second day as an official presidential ticket — and barely a week after McCain announced Palin as his running mate — in Colorado underscores just how crucial the campaign sees the state in its election hopes. Both candidates said as much on stage Saturday.

“Colorado, it’s going to be a hard-fought battle here,” Palin said. “It’s going to be a really tough battle, but we’re going to win.”

El Paso County, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-1, made for a logical place to launch that battle, and supporters at the rally Saturday brought enthusiasm to match even Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s devoted followers.

They began lining up to get into the rally as early as 5:30 a.m., even though doors for the event didn’t open until 9 a.m.

By the time doors did open, traffic jammed for miles around the airport and the line of people waiting to get in wound for several hundred yards around large hangars.

“I’ve never done anything like this before. Nothing,” said Tom Strawser, who left his Denver house with his wife, Patricia, at 5 a.m.

They arrived at the airport at 6 a.m. and found 50 people already in line ahead of them.

Palin, the quick-witted, charismatic and conservative Alaska governor, was a big reason for the energy coursing through the crowd, supporters said.

“It has energized the base,” Patricia Strawser said. “And it shows how bright John McCain is. He knows how the game is played. It is game on now.”

After the speech, many attendees were euphoric.

Not everyone won over

McCain and Palin treated the crowd to speeches that largely echoed those they gave earlier in the week at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

McCain vowed to veto earmark-laden bills as president and said he would push for new domestic oil and natural-gas drilling, nuclear power plants and more renewable sources of energy, something he said that would, combined, create millions of new jobs.

McCain also promised support for those hurt by the faltering economy.

“All you’ve ever asked your government is to stand on your side and not in your way,” he said. “And that’s just what I intend to do.”

As McCain and Palin spoke, a group of about 80 Democrats and Obama supporters gathered at a downtown Colorado Springs coffee house to watch the event on television and hold a rally of their own. Later, Colorado Democratic Party chairwoman Pat Waak said she found the speeches short on solutions.

“I don’t see how they get us out of the economic muck we’re in with what they’re saying,” Waak said. “I don’t hear anything coming from the Republicans for how they would make our lives better. ”